It was my luck to be born in a little nook of the backwoods, by the side of a hoar hill of the Tuscarora, where the eagle builds its eyrie, and the wild cat rears its kittens; it was not my choice, but my mother, who had the whole arrangement of the matter, would have it so; and I had never seen a Duchess. In coming up the stairs I had to work myself up into a fit of aristocracy. “Mr. John,” said I, “you are a good looking man, and fashionably dressed; your father was a soldier in the Revolution—a major at St. Clair’s defeat; besides, you are yourself of rather a noble descent, your wife’s grandmother was the daughter of James Blakely, admiral ——.” With these encouragements I stepped from the Broad Mountain into the saloon of the Duchess.
However, I was not greatly diverted chèz madame la Duchesse. I did not feel any of my faculties much tickled except curiosity, and the flutter of novelty is soon over; one soon gets used to be surprised. I had a kind of hum-drum talk with an old general, who fought me the Revolution over again, beginning with the Bastille. I might have been numbered among its victims, but I fortunately thought of a bon-mot of Aristotle: I wonder any one has ears to hear you, who has legs to run away from you—so I ran home to bed and dreamt of the battle of Waterloo.
The French in high life have become a more grave and thinking people than formerly, but I believe they cannot substitute any qualities without injury, in the place of their natural levity and cheerfulness. They cannot make themselves more amiable than they were in the reign of Madame du Deffand and Madame Geoffrin. The proportion of ladies in the saloon of the Duchess was quite scanty. This ought to be the case where a woman is the centre of attraction, but it is not to my taste. If I had run foul of a woman this evening, instead of this vieille moustache, I should not have had a night-mare of Lord Wellington.
And now, what shall I do with these two sheets, since I have done with the Duchess? I will talk about the weather. Hezekiah would have made no kind of figure here with his dial. Mothers feed their children on the fog with a spoon, as you do them on pap. What a litter of idiots these vapours will breed! I just swim about in them in a kind of unconscious imbecility of intellect. I intend to try some, one of these days, if I can count four. As for the streets, one cannot put a foot upon them, without being splashed half way up to the chin, with every kind of immundicity.
No one ever thinks of going into “Jean Jaques Rousseau,” except in a fit of despair, as I do when I expect your letters. Why, there was a man, who went through the streets a few days ago, to put a letter in the office, and he sunk three leagues in the mud; he has not been heard of since. The French remedy for such weather is charcoal; to be asphyxied is a natural death here.
A French girl being crossed in love the other day, and killing herself the usual charcoal way, kept a journal of her sensations:—“At twelve, difficulty of respiration and cold sweat; at twelve and a quarter, violent pain in the chest, &c.”—Speaking of suicide, here are some curious statistics:—for love, two and a half women to one man; for reverses of fortune, three men to a woman; and five men to a woman for baffled ambition. Of the men, the greater number from thirty-five to forty-five; of women, from twenty-five to thirty-five; and twice as many girls as boys before the age of fifteen—so say Talset’s Tables. Two women to a man for love, implies that either men have the greater attractions, or women the greater sensibility—which is it? I will finish this paragraph with an adventure of a few days ago, which comes in apropos enough, talking about charcoal.
There lives in the Rue de Tournon an old Sibyl called Madame le Norman, whom all persons of sense or nonsense, who are curious about the future, visit. She can spell the stars, and she reads the destinies, as I do the Journal des Debats, and she acquired such a fame by predicting the overthrow of Napoleon, that her house has been literally beset ever since by petitioners. You have to bespeak her a week a-head. A great comfort she is to the young gentlemen, whose fathers won’t die, and she gives hopes to married ladies, who have old husbands.
Well, this prophetic old woman told Doctor C.—he had a wife and two children in a foreign land pining after him, which proves she can see behind as well as before; and that he would make acquaintance this week with a noble lady—all true! Then she held my hand, and cast a peering look upon it, and thrice shook her head. Alas! she saw in my face a great many “drowning marks.”
So you see there is no chance in the world, unless your prayers shall reverse the fates, of my ever getting home. I will tell you why I was induced to go on this expedition to Delphos, for which I am sorry now, for I think, like Julius Cæsar, that the mind of man should be ignorant of its fate—it was to accompany your old acquaintance, ——, who has fallen desperately in love with a Frenchwoman—Mais, ma chère, vous n’en avez pas l’idée!
In fine, he is so in love, that he has serious thoughts of leaving off chewing tobacco. It was to gratify him that I went, as he wanted to see the end of this Frenchwoman. And now, with this fortune-teller, and the suicides, the bad weather, and a Virginia doctor, I have got rid of a whole page of blank paper, and, ’pon honour, I had no other motive for calling them to your notice.